2) The AFI Los Angeles Festival's "Fox"-y Thinking
The AFI Los Angeles film festival kicks off on Friday with an
opening-night gala for Wes Anderson's stop-motion "Fantastic Mr. Fox," (which is great fun, and more
about which later), and I actually had the chance to sit down with... more AFI
programmer Lane Kneedler and AFI's head of press and publicity John Wildman at
the AFI campus in L.A. to talk about this year's fest. And yes, "Fox" is set to
star the fest, and there are other galas set like Colin Firth's "A Single Man"
and Robert De Niro's "Everybody's Fine" and the praised, Oprah-approved
"Precious," but Kneedler's the first one to point out that AFI is a lot more
than that, and how the gala films " ... are often the films I don't need to talk
about as much; the rest of the fest is the driving engine." Like, for example,
this year's Halloween night program with "Best Worst Movie" (a hilarious look at
the cult around the hack-horror camp classic "Troll 2"), "Wake in Fright" and a
midnight screening of the grisly, giddy Australian Prom-night nightmare "The
Loved Ones." As Wildman explained, when AFI hit over Halloween last year, the
fest " ... kinda ran away from it a little bit." This year's plan involved the
festival saying, as Wildman put it, "Let's go after it. Let's really program a
Halloween night. ..."
And there are other interesting things about AFI
when you get past the promise of the presence of pop-culture powerhouses for the
paparazzi on gala nights -- like the family-friendly bill of fare the fest is
promoting, including the deliriously delightful and daffy stop-motion "A Town
Called Panic." As Kneedler puts it, "I'm not really looking for family-specific
programming, but I'm delighted when we find it. ..."And Kneedler's also excited
about some of the festival's more, ahem, adult offerings: "I most look forward
to weird events; introducing Werner Herzog for "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New
Orleans" will be a highlight, of, like, my life. ..." The AFI festival starts on
Friday, and while the fact that tickets this year are free means pre-show
tickets are snapped up for most films, Wildman predicts that there'll be plenty
of rush tickets available, in no small part thanks to the California factor
where plans can shift like the wind from the Santa Anas: "This is L.A. ..." I'm
looking forward to many of AFI's screenings -- like Saturday the 31st's
triple-bill of the British "Red Riding" Trilogy, following a police
investigation in 1974, 1980 and 1983 -- and we'll have more from the fest next
week. ... Close
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